Enterprises have become hyper competitive with one another in the pursuit of customers and customer loyalty. Technological advancements have permitted enterprises to become even more creative in with their efforts to satisfy the customers.
Moreover, technology has also been integrated within enterprises to make the enterprises more operationally efficient and to reduce staffing needs and expenses of the enterprises.
For example, in the hospitality industry most businesses are regularly developing new ways for using technology: to engage their guests, to win over guests from existing competitors, and to improve the overall perceived guest experiences when the guests are interacting with establishments of the businesses.
Consider, a customer ordering at a fast-food establishment (deli, coffee shop, etc.) during a heavy traffic period, many customers can be waiting for the completion of their orders as orders come up.
Some businesses try to manage this situation by shouting out the order for the customer to identify. This approach is inefficient because a customer that is supposed to get the order may not be paying attention, may be acquiring condiments at a location away from the counter, may be visiting the restroom, may be on the phone, or may be distracted in some other manner. So, the workers may set the order aside and forget for some extended period of time to re-shout the order number out again. Most, likely a frustrated customer approaches the workers and asks where it is.
Other businesses will print an order number on a customer receipt that is given to the customer and then shout the order number out when the order is ready for pickup. This has problems as well because not all customers want receipts and some businesses are trying to get away from producing multiple different copies and versions of receipts (one for the workers, one for the customer). Further, this approach still suffers from the same setbacks detailed above when the order contents are shouted out by the workers. Perhaps, the only benefit of this approach is that the wrong customer is less likely to walk away with an order that was not his/hers because workers can match numbers on customer-retained receipts against receipts carried with the order (whereas this is not done with the first approach described above).
It is noted that both approaches, in the above-described examples, suffer from being impersonal. That is, the customer feels as if he/she is just a number or an order number where the business has no interest at all in who the customer actually is and his/value to the business.